Author Archive

Linda McKee

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be leading AACTE’s first online course with FutureLearn, “Designing Assessments to Measure Student Outcomes.” I am thrilled to be bringing AACTE’s online professional seminars to this robust global platform with enhanced content and an innovative social-learning model. Won’t you join me for this enriching experience?

The assessment course opens January 30 and runs for 3 weeks, requiring about 3 hours per week of your time. Each week, we’ll explore a different aspect of assessment, starting with an overview of foundational issues such as validity and reliability before moving on to designing and using rubrics and surveys.

Registration is now open for AACTE’s first Quality Support Workshop, to be held April 24-26 in Fort Worth, Texas. Bring your team for 2 days of hands-on, expert-facilitated learning and planning around performance assessment, continuous improvement, and quality assurance.

The event is the first in a new series of regional workshops announced last month, offered through the AACTE Quality Support Center. A core component of AACTE’s mission is to support institutions’ continuous improvement efforts. With learning outcomes focused on topics of national or local interest, these workshops will provide accessible, targeted support for teams of faculty and staff.

In support of AACTE’s mission to build capacity for high-quality educator preparation programs, we are excited to announce plans for new regional workshops focused on performance assessment, continuous improvement, and quality assurance.

Three of these Quality Support Workshops will be offered in 2017, tentatively scheduled for spring in the south, summer in the midwest, and fall in the northwest. Specific details will be announced this fall.

A new agreement between AACTE and Educational Testing Service (ETS) will bring support to AACTE member programs as they implement performance assessments with their students. Under the agreement, AACTE will develop various events, online platforms, and communications related to the assessments PPAT, NOTE, and ProEthica.

AACTE is assisting ETS with the development of a curriculum clinic for member institutions that are using the PPAT and piloting NOTE. The clinic aims to guide programs through curriculum redesign based on the reports generated through the performance assessments. AACTE is working on a curriculum matrix template to be used with participating educator preparation providers (EPPs) in a review of their data with ETS. AACTE also will coordinate the creation of case studies with volunteer EPPs to build out the clinic process, to be followed by an interactive curriculum clinic that will guide teams from the EPPs through the redesign process.

The growing conversation, contentious or not, in the teacher preparation community at large about how to prepare great educators is good for the profession and PK-12 students—and is also helping to improve edTPA support and assessment, Stanford University’s Ray Pecheone told 350 educators at the recent AACTE Annual Meeting.

Pecheone, executive director of the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), said during the February 25 edTPA breakfast session, “The fact that the profession is having this dialogue about what makes an effective teacher is critical. Engage it! Embrace it! Through this dialogue edTPA has gotten better. It’s a continuous improvement model.”

Last weekend, I was privileged to represent AACTE on a panel at the conference of the International Literacy Association (ILA). Our session, titled “Cultivating Literacy Achievement Through Quality Teacher Preparation,” touched on current program-improvement efforts, revision of the ILA standards for program recognition, variations in licensure requirements across the country, and policy-related challenges.

Joining me for the discussion were William Teale of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Rita Bean of the University of Pittsburgh (PA), Bryan Joffe of the School Superintendents Association, Chris Koch of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, and others.

LaSaundra Colson Wade has worked with a lot of student teachers in her 18 years as an educator. That’s why she knew that it wasn’t business as usual last spring when she began working with a teacher candidate from nearby Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, GA, who was going through edTPA.

And it’s one of the reasons she’s not surprised that this spring’s student teacher is already her full-time teaching colleague.

Educator preparation faculty at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, like to meet with faculty in other departments to compare notes about how their teacher candidates are doing and how best to support them across study areas.

“That’s just the environment we work in. They are all of our students, as they major in education and an area of the liberal arts and sciences,” explains Kate DaBoll-Lavoie, professor and immediate past chair of the Department of Inclusive Childhood Education at Nazareth. “We want them to succeed. We support our colleagues.”

For the past 2 years, DaBoll-Lavoie and her colleagues have brought to the table new data that have enriched the conversations and helped to focus them on specific needs of students.

Since the launch of the edTPA National Academy consulting service in January, dozens of consultants have been trained and deployed across the country to lead workshops and provide other support for edTPA implementation. In addition, once a consultant is requested through the “Seek Support” feature, a new searchable database is now available to help programs make the right match. AACTE and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity recently announced the official launch of the service in a press release:

Last spring, Phil Munkvold was in his final months of college at Minnesota State University (MSU) Mankato, finishing his clinical experience and preparing his edTPA portfolio.

Thanks to a strong partnership between the MSU Mankato program and the school where Munkvold student taught, he was exposed to the edTPA process as well as the school’s staff and its students shortly after he moved to Minnesota from another state to continue his teacher preparation.